FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT MACARTHUR FELLOWS - PAGE 3

Grant giver: After an 18-month search, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named Rutgers University professor Catharine Stimpson as the new director of the MacArthur Fellows Program. As director, Stimpson, whose field is women's studies, will award five-year grants between $150,000 and $375,000 to people so they may pursue their intellectual interests. Stimpson was chosen because "she knows a lot about the issues in and around the intellectual world," says Adele Simmons, president of the MacArthur Foundation.

Billionaire investor Sam Zell has rearranged leadership at the top of his investment firm, hiring David Helfand and naming him and William Pate co-presidents of Equity Group Investments. In an interview, Zell, 70, said that Helfand's expertise in real estate and Pate's expertise in corporate acquisitions and management is the mix the firm needs. David Contis previously led Zell's real estate investments. He left the company last year to lead the mall group at Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group.

Dr. Eugene Borowitz, 71, of Chicago, a psychiatrist who used his experiences as a young baseball player scouted by the major leagues to devise the anonymous scouting system used to find exceptionally creative people for grants from the MacArthur Fellows Program, died of cancer Tuesday, Oct. 3, in Northwestern Memorial Hospital. "He was a man of great empathy for individuals' efforts," said Champ Ward, who, like Dr. Borowitz, was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the fellowship program was conceived.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem was in his car as it moved slowly through an automatic car wash in Maine when his cell phone rang and he learned he was chosen for a $500,000 "genius" grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. "It was a very strange moment," the 41-year-old said. The call to conductor Marin Alsop, 48, caught her between engagements in Australia and in Prague. "I was just home [in Denver] for two days, so I didn't even know what planet I was on when I got the call.

By William O'Neill, Professor of bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago | May 27, 2006

The recently scuttled University of Illinois plan to recruit out-of-state students instead of equally qualified in-state residents reveals an expensive flaw in the single flagship public university model that has burdened our state for decades. A case can be made that statewide economic development is impeded by a system that maintains a single center of higher education excellence. The accepted myth in Illinois is that the state can't afford more than one "flagship university" (read: the Urbana-Champaign campus)

A University of Chicago physicist, whose work is bringing some understanding to chaos in nature, and an Evanston man, who is one of the few Americans to earn a living chiefly from his poetry, are 2 of 25 recipients of the latest fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. For Albert Libchaber, 51, the physicist, the MacArthur Foundation award of $248,000 to be paid over five years is the second major recognition he has received this year. In January he shared the $100,000 Wolf Foundation Prize in physics.

R.R. Donnelly & Sons Co. elected Steven J. Baumgartner to the new position of senior vice president of human resources, compensation and benefit services. David J. Shaw was appointed chairman and chief executive of Heritage Pullman Bank & Trust Co. and Bank of Commerce and Industry and president of H.P. Holding Company, the principal owner of both institutions. Pioneer Bank & Trust Co. appointed Eric W. Hubbard vice president and department manager of commercial real estate and named Charles D. Collier vice president of commercial lending.

A 17-year-old Romanian-born girl who embedded a computer message in the gene sequence of a strand of DNA has been named the best young scientist in the country. Viviana Risca, a senior at Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, N.Y., won a $100,000 college scholarship when she bested 10 other high school seniors on Monday in the 59th Intel Science Talent Search competition. Risca said her project in steganography, a data encryption technology that allows a computer user to hide a file within another file, was a simple one. Risca, who emigrated from Romania eight years ago, embedded the secret message "June 6 Invasion: Normandy."

A famous golf club's exclusion of women and a lawyer indicted on aiding a jailed terrorist made headlines last week, among other stories with women front and center: Blasting the Masters: Augusta National, the exclusive Georgia golf club and host of the Masters, ran into a little image problem just as the tournament was about to tee off last week. A commentary piece in USA Today underscored the fact that the club "still has no women members." Until 1990, the club had no black members either.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has lured a former University of Chicago executive back to town to take the reins of the $4 billion behemoth. Jonathan F. Fanton will become only the fourth person to serve as president of the 20-year-old foundation when he takes over in September. Fanton served as vice president for planning at the University of Chicago from 1978 until 1982, when he left Chicago to become president of the New School for Social Research in New York City.